Garrett Kennedy: A surprise from above

It moved in a gelatinous ark, floundering through the air, a wobbling piece of water-filled rubber rushing to the ground.

It's getting late. 2 a.m.? Weekday night, I think. Not that it's too important. It's just that it's dark, and every other window on the street is closed.

It's not the first water balloon to fly from my window, to say the least, but this one may very well be the last of the night. You see, throwing a water balloon can be funny, but for some reason drunks have a tendency, dare I say a necessity, to remain dry. It's a part of the whole drunken mentality of taking oneself too seriously while stumbling around like a jackass.

Water, however, is only partly responsible for the negative reaction. Water may comprise a vast part of any drunk's prime phobia, but the projectile force of the water is what generally leads to surprise and then to fear, that riling up of back hairs and gritting of overly bleached teeth symmetrically formed by years of teenage orthodontics and oral fixtures.

And with every other window on my block closed and only my second floor window open, that anger has a retroactive sense to track us down.

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Briefcases. Leather gloves. Suits. Professionalism. Creeping up quickly, staring us down. The omnipresent future of stocks, loans, children, mortgages, Buicks, classic rock, picket fences, McDonald's on Tuesday before soccer practice, nine-to-five (or worse), cubicle-ized, comoditicized, selling, buying, scrambling, clawing. A hectic scheduled future of the mundane, a life ruled by professionalism and dictated by conduct. A nonstop rat race to the finish line that is somewhere so far down the track that it's out of sight, probably somewhere around the next turn but even more likely further than that, some sadistic marathon where there isn't really any winner because the finish line keeps a safe distance until the final runner collapses.

Upon entrance into any college, especially one with the prestige of Penn, there is a strong force that pushes to move its students into the fast track for success. There is the constant reminder that there is money to be made in the world, and through hard, diligent work for voluminous hours a day one can achieve the penultimate of success of...

This is where my rant stops. I'm not really sure what this final goal of Success is, although I'm pretty positive that it's different for everyone. But the vast majority of people have financial success as a part of Success. We all set some type of markers for ourselves, and it is from there that we move in life. The problem that I've seen so many times is that people get so caught up in the flow of the pressure to succeed that they lose sight of everything else in life and begin to take themselves and the world around them a bit too heavily.

This is something that is taught to us here at Penn. We have a hard grading system; a lot of it is based on curves that pit students against each other to get ahead. We are taught that we must out-work everyone else to succeed in our classes, and in this way we will find Success. Success is designated as competitive victory.

It's difficult at times to remain afloat in all of the stuff that's going on in life, but there comes a time when one needs to realize that there is the other side of the coin, that one must not take life quite so seriously or a lot of the simple pleasures, like a water balloon, might slip by. But it's pretty easy to forget all of this when you're fighting for grades or mucking through exams or working toward an ultimate goal, but really there needs to be something more then success measured in comparison to someone else.

What it really comes down to is the fact that it's just life. It can't be taken too seriously. If you take it too seriously, get too stressed out, lose yourself in all the shit that is going on around you, become overwhelmed by the pressures that is life and become preoccupied -- that's when you stop living. The fast pace of daily life can suck anyone under and, for a lot of people, not let them out. So while there is a certain push, a certain drive, especially in an institution such as Penn where nothing is done to hide the money that it and its graduates can boast, and there is a very quick fix idea of happiness through hard work leading to six-figure incomes, just remember to relax. Take time to laugh at the world around. Laugh at yourself. It's just life. There's not really any reason not to.

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So when the water balloon came crashing down and a whole squad of people became quickly soaked, the hair riled and the teeth gnashed. And I suppose on the one hand I can understand why. There is something that sucks about being hit unawares by a water balloon at 2 a.m.

At the same time though, it's just a water balloon. Don't take it, or yourself, too seriously. A little water never hurt anyone.

Garret Kennedy is a senior Anthropology major from Wayne, Pa.

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